Forbes CommunityVoice™ allows professional fee-based membership groups ("communities") to connect directly with the Forbes audience by enabling them to create content – and participate in the conversation – on the Forbes digital publishing platform. Each topic-based CommunityVoice™ is produced and managed by the group.

Opinions expressed within Forbes CommunityVoice™ are those of the participating individuals.

Do You Truly Know What Your Customers Want? Here's Why You Should

Andy Steuer is the CEO of Helpware, helping companies level-up their customer experience.

Shutterstock

In business, you set goals and encourage your team relentlessly to accomplish those goals. Turning a vision into reality takes discipline, passion and a motivated team. As a leader, you have an innate understanding of what customers want. You often make decisions based on your gut, which has served you well over the years and helped your ascent.

While that strategy may have worked to get you where you are, failing to be customer-focused has rarely worked in the long run.

Steve Jobs, former CEO of Apple, is often quoted as saying he didn’t listen to customers. While he may have said that early in his career, he later admitted that it had been a mistake, and that his greatest successes happened when he listened to his customers. “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology,” he said. “What incredible benefits can we give to the customer?” Perhaps that’s why Apple has sold more than a billion iPhones in the past decade, one of the single best-selling tech products of all time.

Customer Experience

As a long-time entrepreneur, I've been an executive or co-founder for several companies that have scaled quickly to get acquired by major multinational corporations. At each of those companies, we have scaled customer support quickly and efficiently while maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction (CSAT) and internal Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that provided customers with quick response times. I've learned a lot from these experiences and am here to share some of the best practices I've seen.

Every time you have an interaction with a customer or potential customer, you are embedding a perception in their minds. Ensuring your customers have a positive interaction throughout their purchase journey and follow-ups is critical to building loyalty. Consumers make purchase decisions based on emotion. They use facts to justify those emotional decisions.

Great Customer Service

At the heart of the customer journey is the customer service experience. Too often, it’s also where companies — especially new companies — try to save a buck at the expense of the customer. Yet, research from PwC shows that 60% of customers will stop doing business with a company due to unfriendly service. The 2018 study also revealed that customers across a wide variety of industries said they were willing to pay as much as a 16% premium for better service.

Contrast that to the number of times you have heard, “Your call is important to us,” right before being put on hold for 20 minutes.

What You Can Do To Know What Your Customers Want

It can be a simple as asking them. Asking for customer feedback truly helps breed loyalty. Customer support calls and emails provide direct, unfiltered feedback. If someone is unhappy or having trouble with your product or service, they are not shy about telling you about it.

In a connected world, customers are no longer willing to wait to get answers. They want to be able to reach out in an ever-increasing number of methods, including phone, email and social media channels. You need to monitor all of them, and constantly be on the lookout for what customers are saying about you.

Maybe your organization is big enough to have a VP of Customer Success, a VP of Customer Support or a VP of Customer Experience. If that’s you, you need to evaluate how you are connecting with customers to find out what they really want. And even if you don’t have those positions in your organization, you need to prioritize understanding the customer journey.

I know what you’re thinking right about now: Yes, I know we need to provide exceptional customer service and provide a positive experience in every touchpoint, but…

• I can’t find qualified people.

• I don’t have enough staff to cover 24/7.

• I can’t afford the cost.

While it’s easy to say you can’t afford to do these things, the real answer is that there is a better way.

Think about how much you spend on acquiring customers every year. How much are you spending to retain your customers? Most companies don’t think about customer support being part of the marketing effort. But it is. The budget you allocate to customer support is really part of your marketing budget.

By rethinking customer support as part of your marketing team, you also need rethink to customer lifetime value (LTV). Realize that each customer support inquiry is an opportunity to engage your customers, and turn that communication opportunity into a magic moment for your customer. Specifically, here are three suggestions for how you can level up your customer experience:

1. Journey Mapping: Take the time to map out your customer journey and identify where your customer may need some assistance. Is it when you onboard them? Is it a few days after their product has arrived in the mail? Is it right when they sign up for a free trial? All of these events trigger unique opportunities to provide a white-glove experience for the user that anticipates what the customer may need at that moment in time.

2. Target KPIs And Internal SLA: Imagine what you want your upper limit response time to be for your customer support inquiries. What's acceptable to you, and what's not? Is a one-hour time frame to respond to a customer support inquiry acceptable? How about a 10-hour response time? By defining these internal metrics, you can build an internal SLA where you hold your team accountable for delivering against these performance metrics.

3. Budget: Many companies treat customer support as a cost center. However, if you structure your team and your messaging properly, you can boost your customer loyalty, and have customer support be a marketing function rather than an afterthought.

Forbes Agency Council is an invitation-only, fee-based organization for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Find out if you qualify at forbesagencycouncil.com/qualify. Questions about an article? Email feedback@fo...